The Beauty of the Sea  

Are we not in a theater?

Watching the sun set behind the fog,

The brilliant colors of the clouds changing

Through the rainbow, and always

The blue sea, its iridescent reflection of the sky,

The pale blue, deep blue, slate blue, electric blue,

The falling sun blazing off it like hand pounded gold.

The wind-made waves like scales of a sea serpent,

Rippling like a flag in the wind. Its depth, our depth, and always, always,

Its beauty.  

Richmond Bay Trail 1-2-12

in the Smithsonian

What do I mean when I say

‘The people use it every day

But know not of its existence’?  

When a child feels a grandmother’s love,

And offers it to a little pup;

When the volunteers clean the beach,

When they vote for the politician whose truth they seek,

When the lovers exchange gifts,

When an artist colors a mountain peak,

When the dancers twirl up on a stage,

Who guided them from an early age?

What energy lives within the heart,

That feels so right from the very start?

Some call it love, others faith,

Some wisdom, some Tao, some call it fate.

The hand that framed the tiger’s symmetry,

The architect of all that be,

This is what I mean when I say

The people use it every day,

But are not aware of its existence..

It’s going to take all of it,

Sufis, Buddhists, and Kaballah,

Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed,

Hindus, Bahai, and the Aztecs,

Don’t throw away any wisdom.

Why should we have to choose

Any spiritual path to exclude.

I want them all,

Each contribution,

To answer the transcendental call.

12-15-11

Richmond Field Station

Sin and Ash

The encrustation of sin
Overlays our pure selves.

We must burn this biological remnant,
This blackened karma,
Down to it’s primordial ash
Through the energetic inner itch,
The fire of tapas.

Not through self-immolation,
Nor personal flagellation,
Or even remembrance and recrimination,
But rather with fiery determination
Through steely meditation
And emotional pacification.

Let the inner fires burn.
Change the smelter into urn.
Leave nothing save carbonic churn.
Liberate the energy,
Send past transgressions to the sea,
The universal urgency
Discarded, leaving only peace.

The desire,
Quenched by the fire,
Incarnation of human ire,
Disappears from the earthly pyre;
Saves us from sin’s living hell,
The residue of human evil,
Ignorance and pathology,
Disease and mistaken philosophy.

[Pulls out loaf of bread}

[Reaches into other pocket]

[Removes bottle of wine]

[Sets tablecloth on table he built]

[Lays out wine and bread]

‘Come, let’s enjoy lunch,’ he invites

Da Vinci’s  The Bread and Wine ~ Jesus Christ

The idealization of civilization

Is a process that bears repeating,

Conforming our world to a sustainable design

Is just intelligence in action.

Reducing our destructive impact on plants

Preserves our future survival as

Plants make oxygen and consume carbon dioxide,

So necessary for breathing.

Reducing toxic waste, increasing

Organic food production,

Controlling our reproductive urge,

Using renewable energy sources,

Conservation and efficiency

Are necessities today as

The industrializing nations on Earth

Increase their resource consumption.

Every act taken on the part of society

Must now look at mass consequences,

No practice is small when amplified by the masses,

Global effects require global action.

Prevention is wisdom applied to science

In the service of humanity as

Our interdependence with life and ecology

Demand our immediate attention.

(This came to me after meeting the glance of a young Chinese woman in a Chinese restaurant at lunchtime in Oakland Chinatown. The transfer of energy between us was sufficient that I could tell she was someone special. I was thinking about Chinese civilization that had reduced all of philosophy to the I Ching, the book cherished by Confucius.  Yet without the cultivation of ki, living spirit, even the I Ching becomes a meaningless set of symbols.  It is mind that lends symbols their meaning.  Thus all of the tools of civilization are only useful when wielded by the mind. Even the highest of religions and philosophies become meaningless when the spirit is neglected or injured.)

1-28-10

The Spirit of Ki

The greatest science means nothing without

The living spirit running through it.

The infinitude of data constitutes

A haystack with needles of truth in it.

The reduction of knowledge to simple rhymes

Has a tremendous value,

But like soldiers at war with a mnemonic device,

Without a decoder it is hollow.

The simplification of philosophy

Is very efficient, no question,

But without the human ability to emote,

There is no means for value assessment.

The energy that passes between individuals

Is the projection of living spirit,

Controlling the mind and the intellect,

Itself an organic event.

Conscious awareness and mind are the same,

Each essentially divinity,

Disassociated from the body at death,

Lapses into the universal infinity.

Strength of mind, strength of spirit,

Is the definition of vitality.

In concert with balance it represents health,

The highest value of society.

As spirit passes from one to another,

There occurs nonverbal communication.

This silent level of interaction

Leads the wisest in civilization.

Focuses on what not and what to do.

A pious code of ethics did devolve,

A book of right and wrong, a moral resolve.

So is that what religion’s for, to help one think,

Or is there something deeper here at play?

Is there something more akin to mystical

Enjoyment, something founded in the Way?

Did Jesus come to teach or just to pray?

He did not learn water walking in a day.

His disciples were to be born children again,

So they could become as he was, kith and kin.

Gautama sat 40 days and 40 nights

Before the Bodhi tree released its fruit.

His followers learned to meditate and pray

So that their kundalinis could take root.

Rumi preached of getting drunk on God.

Hardly sounds like a book on philosophy, does it now?

Don Juan is remembered for his feats of power,

Not just his scolding Carlos for forgetting Tao.

Mohammed was not simply about moral fables,

But something magical was indeed at work.

He did not lead his people by intellection,

But by stirring them within, Allah to seek;

And on – Ramakrishna, Ouspensky, Paul,

Teilard de Chardin, Beatrice, all;

The Madonna, Tonatzin, the elevated spirit

Is a guide to spirituality for those who hear it.

Religions are founded by mystics, not intellectuals.

The mystic message is to stop thinking altogether.

To silence the chatter of the mind,

To once and for all experience quiet pleasure.

Without this core experience of wonder,

There is no deeper inspiration from whence truth comes.

Revelation is a gift to all humanity

That stems from beyond this earthly plum.

It is up to us people to emulate

The lives of those we worship from afar

By seeking the treasure of enlightenment.

Its gifts are experiential, and from the heart.

Excessive focus on ideology

Makes rule-makers of the prophets.

The main idea of religion then is lost,

Replaced by money-changers and their pockets.      .

The True Nature of the Spiritual Path

The spiritual path is not some fashion accessory like a diamond ring or a fur coat.  More than an idea or concept, spirit is a part of us, one of our inborn faculties, no less than a limb or the sense of smell. But even as a part of us, the spirit is different in that it is subtle and less obvious than a world dominated by the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual.

To engage the “spirit” we must open our minds to the possibility of the “metaphysical”, to the area of brain that senses the energy of the world.  In the Lakota tradition, the phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”, (all my relations), is invoked at ceremonies. The idea that relations exist with everything in this world, animate and inanimate, opens up the mind to the possibility of spirituality in all situations.

Atheism, the rejection of the idea of spirit, exists in cultures with human-dominated environments and advanced intellectual systems of knowledge. The valuing of spirit is more an aspect of “primitive” cultures, cultures that have a more direct relationship to nature and to death. The proximity of death is the great spiritualizer, as is shown by the many spiritual awakenings that accompany near-death experiences.

In contemporary cultures, death is neatly banished from our daily lives. We do not kill our own food, we see corpses only at open-casket funerals, and we have relegated our elders to “homes” where we don’t have to care for them anymore, instead paying others to deal with infirmity and death for us. This contrast between civilization and the “primitive” is a strong and recurrent theme in modern art, film, and literature.

It is precisely this disconnection from the presence of death that dulls our spiritual nature. It is why we find spirituality in wilderness, away from civilization where wild animals and plants are free to live and die without human intervention. The Deists and Transcendentalists of the 19^th century like the aboriginal cultures of the world found the spiritual in nature through experience rather than as a mental construct.

Without the discomforts and risks of the struggle to survive, in the midst of surplus, spirituality fades, replaced by a false sense of security. Prophets down through the ages have foreseen and expressed through poetic and artistic visions the end of surplus and the advent of struggle.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The fall of civilizations follows on the heels of luxury and amorality, equated with the absence of spirituality. It was Plato who wrote that …”All boys should be raised as bastards,” meaning that boys need to have struggle in order to become responsible and mature men, and decried the effects of opulence and luxury. The Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden is the fall from grace, like the Fall of Icarus who ignored his father’s advice and so flew too close to the sun and drowned.

If we wish to remain sober in our lives, we must acknowledge the inevitability of our own death, and the web of life of which we are only a part. In that sense our spiritual path, the spiritual aspect of the life that we live, is greatly influenced by our immediate and empirical contact with raw nature. This is why the aboriginal cultures of the world have a palpable relationship to both spirit and nature.

It is why many flock to wilderness for spiritual connection. In the wilderness experience there is danger. There is the personal requirement of self-reliance amidst numerous deadly perils: Drowning in a river, falling from a cliff, confronting a wild animal, getting caught in a storm, running out of food.

Combined with meditation and contemplation in nature, one’s spirit can be awakened. Thoreau described in Walden his sensing of what he termed “The Oversoul”, what the Native Americans refer to as the “Great Spirit”. One is reminded of the life of Jesus who lived in the desert for years and later railed against the materialism of the money changers in the temple; of Siddhartha who left the royal luxury of his upbringing where infirmity and death had been eliminated from his presence, and  became the Buddha, the Awakened One; of John Muir, the son of a Presbyterian minister for whom the Sierra Nevada mountains became the temple where he worshipped.

The wilderness experience can be the key to awakening one’s spiritual awareness, and bringing the values of personal morality into daily life causes one to learn to live without luxury and surplus, and culminates in the end of materialism. It is in the origin of religions that spirituality overcomes materialism, and is a necessity for the survival of a culture that has lost its way. Environmentalism is nothing less than the modern version of reawakening the spirit as a response to a materialistic culture that has ignored the ancient values of the spirit, putting itself in deadly jeopardy.